With the development of mobile Internet, terminal users have an increasingly high requirement on bandwidths. A heterogeneous network (HetNet) is put forward to satisfy hotspot scenario and indoor communication requirements in an advanced evolved system (LTE-Advanced), and a main implementation manner is to introduce some base stations having small coverage and low transmit power into a conventional network structure, where the base stations are referred to as transmission points (TP), and a cell covered by a transmission point is usually referred to as a small cell. In this way, when user equipment (UE) moves to a small cell covered by a transmission point, a service of the UE may be handed over to the small cell covered by the transmission point, so as to achieve objectives of increasing a system capacity and increasing a user throughput.
For the HetNet network, if UE that initially camps on a base station and that is in an RRC-IDLE mode (RRC-IDLE) needs to receive downlink data from a network or needs to transmit uplink data, the UE needs to establish a connection to the base station. When the UE is within coverage of a TP, in order to offload traffic to a small cell of the TP, the UE needs to measure, under a precondition that the UE establishes a connection to the base station, a cell of the TP according to a radio resource control connection re-configuration message sent by the base station, and reports a measurement result.
If UE that initially camps on a TP and that is in an RRC-IDLE mode needs to receive downlink data from a network or needs to transmit uplink data, the UE needs to establish a connection to the TP. When the UE is within coverage of a base station, in order to balance load into a cell of the base station, the UE needs to measure, in a case in which the UE establishes a connection to the TP, a cell of the base station according to a radio resource control connection re-configuration message sent by the TP, and reports a measurement result.
In the prior art, UE performs cell measurement and reports a measurement result all under a precondition that the UE establishes a connection to a base station or a TP, and a time at which the UE finds a new cell that can establish a connection to the UE is relatively late.